Category: Prickly City

We live in a time where one of the front runners for president of the United States is a Black Man (spare me the details, it is what it is).

It is easy for many to act like this is the big moment and that suddenly we don’t have to worry about racial progress. The fact remains is that in even the most mundane issues, (one man’s mundane issue is another man way to feed his family, mind you) There are still mountains to climb.

Tomorrow there will be a protest registered to highlight another obstacle that exists for people of color.

You could call it a sit-in, of sorts. Perhaps a sketch-in would be more appropriate, a comic call to arms, with cartoonists of color protesting for greater presence in newspaper pages. Protesting in the best way they know: drawing about it, en masse, all on the same day.

Because, these artists say, “Candorville” does not equal “Boondocks” or “Curtis” or “Wee Pals” or “Herb and Jamaal.” And “La Cucaracha” does not equal “Baldo” or “Gordo” and especially not “Cafe con Leche.”

But for one day — this Sunday — 11 cartoonists of color will be drawing essentially the same comic strip, using irony to literally illustrate that point. In each strip, the artists will portray a white reader grousing about a minority-drawn strip, complaining that it’s a “Boondocks” rip-off and blaming it on “tokenism.” “It’s the one-minority rule,” says Lalo Alcaraz (“La Cucaracha”). “We’ve got one black guy and we’ve got one Latino. There’s not room for anything else.”

Now I will be honest. I’ve never read the Comics in my local Newspaper (the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or should I say the Fort Worth edition of the McClatchy Press) because clearly the Editors didn’t want me to.

In fact, Let me stop and go peep today’s comics and see what I am missing.

*leaves to retrieve today’s comics out of the recycle can*

Hmm…Let’s see.

Two full Pages…a total of 32 Multi-panel strips and 10 singles. They stash Mallard Fillmore over on the Opinion Page where I do my best to ignore it.

Yup.

That good ole stand by Curtis and Baldo hold it down for the Cartoons of color.

This one was pretty good though

I take my comics seriously. I started out reading the Sunday Comics in the as Pittsburgh Press (RIP) as a child. I always read the comics, even as an adult.

Then Came the Boondocks. I was a Boondocks Stan. I remembered them in the Source (the original Source, not that thing they trot out now) . A good friend of mine knew Aaron Magruder and I even met the cat once. Cool Cat.

I can’t speak for you, but I remember picking up the Washington Post everyday to see what Huey and Riley were up to. To be honest, as amused as I am by the Cartoon Network version there is no comparison to the glory days of the comic strip. Then one day, my divorce-fueled mental breakdown took hold and I stopped following it religiously.

I never really got back to it like I should have. That is my fault.

I moved to Pittsburgh and migrated to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette where The Boondocks had migrated to the Opinion section.

Then I moved to Texas and since the Fort Worth Star-Telegram apparently had cancelled the Strip becuase apparently folk caught feelings. (you know how sensitive Republicans can be.)